Gravity Wave Activity in the Stratosphere and Mesosphere at the South Pole (2024)

FAQs

What is the gravity wave in the atmosphere? ›

In a gravity wave, the upward moving region is the most favorable region for cloud development and the sinking region favorable for clear skies. That is why you may see rows of clouds and clear areas between the rows of clouds. A gravity wave is nothing more than a wave moving through a stable layer of the atmosphere.

Gravity waves in the atmosphere are the waves with gravity and buoyancy force as the restoring forces. Gravity waves will significantly impact the Mesosphere Lower / Thermosphere (MLT), and the breaking of gravity waves is the key factor to cause the cool summer and warm winter in the Mesopause region.

Internal gravity waves are waves occurring in the interior of a stratified fluid, with buoyancy providing the restoring force which opposes vertical displacements. Such waves are ubiquitous in the atmosphere and ocean and are the internal counterpart to the familiar surface gravity waves.

They form when air is forced upward by hills or mountains into a layer of stable air in the atmosphere. Gravity causes the air to fall back down, and it begins to oscillate, creating a ripple effect. Wind flowing over the Rocky Mountains, for example, can create gravity waves that are felt as turbulence on an airplane.

From even the distance of the nearest star, gravitational waves would pass through us almost completely unnoticed. Although these ripples in spacetime carry more energy than any other cataclysmic event, the interactions are so weak that they barely affect us.

On 11 February 2016, the LIGO-Virgo collaborations announced the first observation of gravitational waves, from a signal (dubbed GW150914) detected at 09:50:45 GMT on 14 September 2015 of two black holes with masses of 29 and 36 solar masses merging about 1.3 billion light-years away.

In the middle stratosphere (30–40 km), there is higher gravity wave activity near the equator in autumn in the middle stratosphere than in other seasons in 2020, and much less in 2021. The gravity wave activity is low (maximum 5 J kg⁻¹) compared to the lower stratosphere (maximum 10 J kg⁻¹).

This wave forcing of the flow is particularly important in the stratosphere, where this momentum deposition by planetary-scale Rossby waves gives rise to sudden stratospheric warmings and the deposition by gravity waves gives rise to the quasi-biennial oscillation.

However, we do presume that many small gravitational waves are passing by from all over the Universe all the time, and that they are mixed together at random.

The strongest gravitational waves are produced by cataclysmic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae (massive stars exploding at the end of their lifetimes), and colliding neutron stars.

What do gravitational waves tell us about the universe? ›

By tapping into this new source of information about the universe, gravitational wave astronomy might be able to solve some of the biggest puzzles in physics, including: how black holes form, how matter acts in extreme conditions, illuminating the nature of dark matter, and looking at the beginning of the universe long ...

Astronomers have been able to “hear” the celestial hum of powerful gravitational waves, created by collisions between black holes, echoing across the universe for the first time.

Nacreous clouds are some of the rarest clouds on the planet. They are a form of polar stratospheric cloud, which is a main culprit in chemical destruction of the ozone layer.

A gravitational wave is an invisible (yet incredibly fast) ripple in space. Gravitational waves travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

Gravity waves, or gravitational waves, are essentially ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by accelerating masses. To put it simply, when an object with mass accelerates, the resulting gravitational force travels across space and time, creating waves of gravity that reach out infinitely at the speed of light.

“Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime. When objects move, the curvature of spacetime changes and these changes move outwards (like ripples on a pond) as gravitational waves. A gravitational wave is a stretch and squash of space and so can be found by measuring the change in length between two objects.”

9.807 m/s²

Earth / Gravity

The term 'gravity wave' is typically applied to wind-generated, periodic displacements of the sea surface, though nominally tsunamis are also gravity waves. A capillary wave is a wave travelling along the interface between two fluids, whose dynamics are dominated by the effects of surface tension.

According to Coleman, wave-storm interactions are very important. If a gravity wave hits a rotating thunderstorm, it can sometimes spin that storm up into a tornado.